An Island in the City: Ancona’s New Lazaretto as a Medical, Political, and Religious Borderland

This essay explores the role of quarantine stations as sites of creation and disruption of Mediterranean borderlands. It considers the early history of the “new lazaretto,” the maritime quarantine station created in Ancona, a city in the Papal States, after Pope Clement XII declared the city a free port in 1732. Big and beautiful, the new lazaretto was built on an artificial island and marked Ancona’s cityscape. This essay reconstructs how it functioned as a dynamic border space where concerns about disease transmission were addressed through the deployment of practices of environmental and sensory control. It argues that the new lazaretto embodied a liminal environment that was established at the crossroads of medical, economic, religious, and political entanglements and reflected the geopolitical dynamics of the eastern Mediterranean world.